Since the introduction of PC-based layout and publishing software in the late-1980's, the explosive growth of this market has underscored graphic design as a vital component of effective business communications. The information explosion has resulted in hundreds of messages--many enriched with clip art, custom illustrations, and scanned images--vying for attention across a wide variety of media (print, electronic, multimedia, etc.). Businesses have a significant need to visually differentiate their documents above the market noise. Pages that emphasize content with minimal attention to formatting, illustrations, layout, and visual appeal, will no longer attract the attention of increasingly sophisticated business audiences. Business users competing for readers' time now place a premium on creating and publishing graphically attractive communications.
The proliferation of software tools, ready-made content (e.g., on-line photo libraries and CD-ROM disks of clip art), and desktop peripherals (e.g., color printers and scanners), have made attractive content and output affordable for anyone with a personal computer. In addition, the Internet has had a profound impact on both the breadth of content and distribution opportunities. However, producing professional-quality materials for disparate media, including the Internet, requires design expertise, a variety of authoring tools, and advanced computer skills; a rare combination among most business people. Home and small business users in particular--already taxed for time to cover multiple business roles--seldom have the time or the tools needed to enhance their design and computer expertise.
To assist in the creation of materials, a number of word processing programs, desktop publishing tools, Internet authoring tools and the like have been developed. Many of the word processing programs allow the user to include tables, columns, pictures, rudimentary graphics, etc., within a document. However, these programs are typically not designed to easily facilitate the incorporation of professional looking design styles. Whereas a professional designer may find it relatively easy (albeit time consuming) to design a document having a professional looking and a coordinated set of fonts, colors and graphics (for example), such a result is beyond the reach of the typical personal or business user. Typical users know that they would like to be able to produce a design having a particular look in terms of fonts, colors, graphics, paragraph styles, etc., but lack the professional skills needed in order to produce a professional looking document in a short space of time.
For example, a typical user who is creating a document, web page, computer user interface or the like, may wish to produce a document having a "traditional" business like font scheme, but may not have the practiced eye of a professional layout designer in order to choose the correct font for their document title, the body of the text, its captions, etc. A profession designer would be able to choose appropriate fonts for each of these parts of the document that go well together. The typical user, though, has no such expertise.
In a further example, a user may wish to produce a web page having a rather subdued color scheme appropriate for a corporation. The average user may not be able to choose appropriate colors for different parts of the web page that go well together, as would a professional graphic artist. Further, another user who is creating a newsletter for a local club may wish to provide a certain whimsical style to the graphic elements of the newsletter, but may lack the skills of a professional graphic artist in choosing appropriate styles for the graphic elements of the newsletter such as boxes, ornamentation, backgrounds, or borders.
To address this need, certain software programs provide very rudimentary color or font settings for a document, but these lack flexibility and have other drawbacks. For example, recent versions of the WINDOWS operating system available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Washington, allow a user to choose different colors for desktop items on the computer screen. Within WINDOWS, a user may choose the "gaudy" colors and receive a matched set of gaudy colors for all of the items on his or her desktop computer screen. However, this choice of particular colors for items is very rudimentary and has no flexibility. Each item is assigned a particular color and the user may not easily experiment or select from a coordinated set of a range of possible colors for the items. And because each item on the screen is assigned a particular color, should the user change to different colors, the relationship between items on the screen and their colors are lost. For example, if the color designer wished the border of a document to always be two shades brighter than the background, he or she would have to program (or "hard wire") this preference into each and every set of colors. Even worse, if the component designer of the components on the screen wanted the border component to always be two shades brighter than the background component, he or she would have to coordinate with the color designer, and oversee his or her work in order to make sure that the colors always made the border two shades brighter. Also, a user is not able to indicate that he or she desires more items being in color, or desires a greater variety of colors within a particular color setting.
In a further example of rudimentary settings, recent versions of Microsoft Word allow a user to define a particular style for a paragraph or a document. This defined style may then be applied to other paragraphs or documents. However, like the colors described above, this definition of a style does not allow a user to incrementally vary the look of a particular style in order to achieve a finer grained control over a given style. Also, the elements of a document rendered in a particular style are not coordinated. In other words, the styles do not allow relationships between elements of a document to be defined and maintained as a user switches from style to style.
In general, existing techniques for applying particular settings to a document are not flexible enough to allow the user greater control in choosing variations of a particular setting. Also, these existing techniques do not always allow the user to apply a particular setting at all levels of a document ranging from a particular word or heading, on up to the complete document itself. In addition, these techniques do not establish and maintain relationships between parts of a design that can be maintained when a particular setting changes. Therefore, a technique is desired that would remedy the above drawbacks in document production and that would bring the skills of professional designers and graphic artists to the fingertips of the average user.